David Wallace - Infinite jest

[368] Cimetidine — ®SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals — 8oo-mg. spansules for generalized cranio-vascular woe (derived, kind of interestingly, from the same ergot rye-mold as LSD).

[369] For the two maps Sorkin had to have eliminated altogether during this period, it’s maybe worth observing that he eschewed both Towers and instead used the thuggish ex-Québecer muscleboys DesMontes and Pointgravè, who had no real loyalties or membership in any community and hired themselves out as enforcers for books and high-interest lenders all up and down both Shores. Gately did, as a coercive collector, demap one person, but it was essentially an accident — the debtor had been blond, and drinking Heinekens, and then when things got physical he’d squirted Gately in the face with Mace, and a red curtain of rage had descended over Gately’s sight, and when he’d come back to himself the debtor’s head was turned 180° around on his neck and had the little Mace can all the way up one nostril, and it was the most professionally horrified Gately had ever been up until the thing with the suffocated Canadian P.I.T., which anyway occurred much later and when Gately was way more nonviolence-prone.

[370] Purified pork insulin in a zinc suspension — ®Lilly Pharmaceuticals.

[371] An elite private high school up near the Methuen salient.

[372] Surely skeet and vig, meaning debt and bookmaker’s automatic percentage (usually 10 % subtracted from winnings or added to skeet) are not just metro Boston terms.

[373] A.k.a. Acetylcysteine-zo — ®Bristol Laboratories — a nebulizable prophylaxis against the post-traumatic buildup of abnormal, viscid, or inspissated mucus.

[374] With the hard-ch sound distinctive of North Shore pronun. of words like Chicago and champagne.

[375] Known less sensitively among neuro-urology residents as ‘Dizzy Dick Disorder’ or sometimes just ‘3-D.’

[376] Knoll Laboratories’ good old Dilaudid — $666.00/g. wholesale and $5/mg. street at Y.W.-Q.M.D. valuations.

[377] A ‘Phillips Screwdriver,’ vodka and Milk of Magnesia, which Gately finds nauseous and privately refers to as a ‘lowball.’

[378] (As opposed to self-confronting, presumably.)

[379] See Note 144 supra.

[380] The 1.3:1-aspect-ratio rectangle scanned by electron beams in video imaging, now replaced by multi-interlace 3solid-field HD digital imaging.

a. Why Noreen Lace-Forché’s seminal corporation’s name was a kind of wry pun: 2:1 interlace was pre-HD television’s term for breaking the picture frame into two 262.5-line fields for standard 525-line raster-scanning… A very in-type joke designed to appeal to the same Big Four that Noreen L.-F. was then wooing.

[381] More like B.S. 1926, according to the Still Photo Archive at NNY City’s Museum of Modern Art. Plus n.b. the print — which Hal correctly remembers Avril always loathing a— long pre-dated J.O.I.’s ever picking up a camera.

a. Hence the relative queerness of its still being up on the HmH living room wall four years after Incandenza’s felo de se — it’s not like anybody asked her to keep the thing up.

[382] Whether in singles against him or doubles alongside, when Hal is on-court with Wayne he always gets the creepy feeling that Wayne has control out there not just of his voluntary CNS but also of his heartrate and blood pressure, the diameter of his pupils, etc., which feeling is not only creepy but distracting, adding to the tension of playing with Wayne.

[383] Winter Park FL facility for enmeshment-, codependency-, and compulsivity-related Issues.

[384] A.k.a. Lorazepam — ®Wyeth-Aherst Labs — a venerable anti-anxiety tranq, of which 25 mg./day is enough to anxiolytize a good-sized Clydesdale.

[385] Probably meaning Doryx, Parke-Davis’s doxycycline hyclate, the Cruise missile of gram-negative antibiotics.

[386] Nalaxone hydrochloride, the Exocet missile of narcotic antagonists — ®DuPont Pharm. — 2 ml./2Oml.-saline pre-filled syringes.

[387] Metro Boston’s third-hardest thing to street-cop after raw Vietnamese opium and the incredibly potent DMZ, Sunshine is pentazocine hydrochloride and mefenamic acid 3— ®Sanofi Winthrop, Canada, Inc. — w/ trade-name Talwin-PX — Day-Glo-yellow serum, 7ml./20ml.-saline pre-filled syringes.

a. A non-narc analgesic marketed in the U.S. as Ponstel — ®Parke-Davis — mostly (oddly enough) for dysmenorrhea, sort of like nuclear-grade Mydol.

[388] Talwin-NX — ®Sanofi Winthrop U.S.